A fire on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Triangle Waist Company killed 146 garment workers — overwhelmingly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women — in roughly 18 minutes. The factory’s exit doors had been locked from the outside to prevent theft and unauthorized breaks; workers leapt from upper-story windows to escape. The fire catalyzed the New York Factory Investigating Commission, modern workplace-safety codes, and a generation of pro-labor New Deal officials, including Frances Perkins, who witnessed the deaths from the street and went on to serve as Secretary of Labor.

Why it’s been targeted

Labor history broadly has been compressed or removed in Texas’s 2024 TEKS social-studies rewrite; Texas Tribune reporting documents that the framework “deemphasizes” labor and immigration history in favor of state-centric chronology. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and A Young People’s History of the United States — primary popular sources for Triangle Shirtwaist coverage — are among the most-removed titles in Texas (Krause list), Tennessee, and Iowa per PEN America. The Florida Department of Education’s 2023 textbook adoption rejected K-5 materials that “indoctrinate” students on collective action.